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Lesson 14 from: Canon Rebel T6s/T6i Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

14. Quick Menu

Next Lesson: Playback Options

Lesson Info

Quick Menu

Let's talk about the quick menu on the camera so I like to think about the different controls of the camera are in three different categories the most important ones are ones that have direct button access on the camera like the mod ill or the s o or the dr button on the back of the camera these air things you want to have direct control up on the other end of the spectrum we have the menu khun controls where we have this long list of items in the menu and weaken scroll through these and make fine tuning adjustments in their but is there's a lot of work to get to him between the two we have the quick menu and this is a shortcut to a number of our favorite and most commonly used modes in the camera so in the quick control menu we're going to activate this bypassing the cube button on the camera and we're going to see this screen on the back of the camera and along the top row of this it's going to show us our shooting mode r shutter speeds are apertures and our isos now these air going ...

toby controls that are controlled through buttons and dials on the rest of the camera but we can do some controls in here let's go to the camera and let me turn this quick menu on so that you can see on the back of my camera what's going on so the cube button right here and this is very common on all current candid cameras, is the cue button activates the screen, and you'll notice that this is highlighted. And if I said I want to change it, I could use the touch screen. And I could come in here, and I could change my aperture to whatever aperture I want there at five point six, and then I can return to the home screen. I could go in and change my I s o. Two, four hundred on the screen now I would in many cases I prefer just using the button on the camera because I think it's a little bit easier to get teo and I could press harder and I don't have to worry about pressing something else on there but this could be done in the quick menu and so you'll be able to navigate to all these different features that we're going to be talking about so let's go through the last on the keynote and talk about what these different features are so that's our top row and then down at the bottom it will show you what item that you are specifically talking about the d plus we saw this before in the viewfinder and what this is is a mode that you can turn on and off in the menu system and what it does is it tries to protect the highlights and you'll notice the area of the archway here on the photo and the left is very blown out we've lost a lot of that detailed information because we've had this mode disabled and it was just very brighten it let it go out now if you enable it it's going to protect the highlight information and so you would think with samples like this that we would all want to choose enable the problem is is that if we choose enable what's happening is the camera no longer allows us to shoot at ia so one hundred which is where we get the best image quality and so there's a bit of a tradeoff going on here and so it's not something I recommend and if you shoot raw images chances are you're not gonna have a problem with this and so I don't recommend using this but it is there for somebody who does find use for this and this could be turned off in the custom function section under number three highlight tone priority and we will pass by that when we get to the menu section next up is our exposure compensation and manual meet oring and bracketing area and so this is going to show us if we're shooting lighter or darker photos in here and so one of the options is to shoot a bracket siri's now we did a manual bracket earlier on and so what I want to do now is I want to do a little demo of a automatic bracketing system so let me show you how this works let's go ahead and hit the cue on our camera and I am going to jump up in here and I'm gonna hit the set button and we have two controls on this camera if I turned the back dial I can shoot a photo that is underexposed overexposed and if I turn the top dial watch what it does here I am now going to be shooting three photos and we'll do the extreme range and so we can take this and we can also move the whole scale left and right we're going to leave it in the middle and what's going to happen is we're going to shoot three photos one's going to be darker once going to be normal and one's going to be lighter so let's go ahead and let me just get a somewhat focus this on a subject and we'll go ahead and I'm just gonna hold it down actually need to take three pictures one two, three and let's play these images back and so this is our playback shot this one seems very much light and you'll notice down at the bottom it says plus two this one's darker at minus two and this one doesn't have anything which means it's at zero and so we're doing bracketing in this case an automatic automated bracketing now I going toe up this buy one in its intensity I'm going to put this in the motor drive mode I'm going to go back into the bracketing and I'm going to take this whole thing and I'm going to shift it off to the dark side all right so now the centre one is going to be at minus two and then we're going to have to photos on either side of it and now because I put this in the motor drive mode, all I need to do is press down and hold down on the shutter release and it's on ly going to shoot three photos. Ready. Here we go. Shot three let's. Take a look at the images. We're going to play it back. You see so that's one image. So our first images at minus two our next images at minus for that one's really dark and our final image is not doesn't have any at all, and so three different images on that. And so this is all done in the bracketing mode, and so u turn the back dial. And for those of you with the six I, you don't have a dial and I don't have a six I with me, but I believe you have to press down there's going to be hints down in the screen, but I believe you have to press the plus minus button and turn the front dial on the camera. And so on this one, we turn the front dial to not do the bracketing and just use the back kyle for exposure compensation and so that's a little bit on how that one works. Okay, so that is exposure, compensation and auto exposure bracketing. Next item is flash exposure compensation. And this is something that we did earlier. But we can also do it straight through here. Remember, this is where I recommended a minus one for a little bit smoother. Lighting, you might say, are not quite as intense lighting when you're doing people photography. We have our picture styles. Now. This is a duplicate of the button on the back of the camera. Some people just prefer working with it in the quick menu, it's the same recommendation of the standard setting. Once again we're seeing another feature that is duplicated that we talked about on the back of the camera the white balance setting but we can see this in the quick menu it's just kind of nice it's it's it's a good reference landing pad to go to toe look at all your different settings now this is something I've never had to do in my camera but if I was getting a little bit of wacky colors that weren't quite right and we're not a problem with specifically white balance is just the camera wasn't recording the correct color you could go in here and tweak with this I hope that you never have to do this chances are you will never have to go into this feature and use it it doesn't seem like this is the best place for it my pet the auto lightning optimizer is another little unique feature where the camera wants to go in and manipulate and work with your images and so I don't I'm always kind of a non fan of these things where the camera is manipulating our images and so once again this is going to be for people who shoot j pegs not for shooting rob whenever you shoot raw you get the original information and there's actually a couple of different things that are going on so let's take a look the auto lightning optimizer what it's generally trying to do is it's trying to look at your shadow areas and your highlights it doesn't want to blow out the highlights and it wants to let you have some shadows so this image is a little bit dark in the shadows and so using an auto lightning optimizer is going to boost the level of the shadows so that you can see what's going on which is going to be good for this photo and some photos not all photos is the problem and so it works in some areas but in other types of photos you want stronger contrast and better shadows so my tendency is to want to leave this off and to fix it in on lee those images that I want to using an appropriate computer program for instance but if you wanted to do it in the camera you can do it here now there are different levels that you can do it as well you can turn it on standard setting versus a low setting and a high setting I would definitely not leave this on a high setting I would if you do want to play with it steps edited either standard or low but once again this is on ly going too affect j peg images not the raw images next up is a shortcut to some of the flash settings the main flash settings are either the built in flash or using this camera with a wireless system and we're going to talk more about this when we get into the menu setting of the flash's. You'll see it's ah it's, a whole rabbit hole of information that you can get into. And this is going to be a shortcut where you can get in and turn some of that information on and off the focusing. This is a duplicate of our f button on the back of the camera. Exactly, choosing this the same things one shot or the continuous, which is the servo mode. And so servo is good that's, the continuous focusing mode for action. One shot is the best mode for general photography. I tend to avoid the focus because that's, where the camera switches back and forth, and you don't have a lot of input as to what's going on. The next one over is the a f area selection mode this is a duplicate of the button on the top of the camera that we have in a couple of various now and so generally it's much easier access with that button on the top of the camera same options are available though okay finally something new here this is the meet oring mode and in this case this is how the camera chooses to meter it has four different modes in how it chooses thie evaluative meter is my most recommended meter it's a a large area it's using three hundred and fifteen different zones in which to measure the light and it's trying to come up with one good average light reading for the entire scene we have partial mita ring which is a fairly small tight area spot metering which is a very pinpoint area and center waited which is kind of a big fat blob right in the middle and so what I want to do is on tried to do a little demo here and so I'm gonna put my camera in aperture priority and leave on my info screen let's go ahead and change this to the spot meter which is something I rarely d'oh and spot meter right here and the only reason I'm doing this is because we have a wall over behind kenna that has some really bright lights on it and I'm guessing that if I get the spot meter over one of these lights. It's going to change the shutter speeds and apertures dramatically, because that light being on is going to be much lighter now. The problem is, is that I can't really see exactly where I'm focusing this camera. But what we want to look at is we want to look at the recommended shutter speeds that are cameras giving us so normally it's two hundred hundred. And we're going to see if I can hit one of these lights over here. I got to see if I can point this. And so, between the lights it's like a tenth of a second. And then if I hit a light, where is it? I'm not finding lnc there. It jumps up to one hundred fiftieth two hundredth of a second, and so you can tell I'm probably pointed at a light, but if I point it at a very dark area, goes down to a quarter of a second. So it's being very, very precise, I can't do this on the live you because this only works in the viewfinder. So we need a little tiny camera man right here on the back of the camera pointed in the back of the camera. So we haven't figured out how to show that one yet, and normally I wouldn't want to leave it in spot, meter and silent. Go back in and I'm going to change it. And I think evaluative metering is where I'd recommend leaving it because that's, where I personally leave it almost one hundred percent of the time, I think it's a great spot for general work, all right, back on the keynote. So that's our different meeting systems. And then next up we have our drive mode and we have a dedicated button on the back of the camera that does this but some people for prefer using that screen and the touch options that it has and then finally we have our option for shooting raw or j peg images and so this is the type of file type that we're recording when we shoot photos the photos that I send out on the internet or I post on my website where I want to put on facebook are going to be j peg images but I like shooting raw images in the camera because that is the file type that gathers all the data and keeps all the data it is a larger file and it needs me to download the image and I need to work on my computer before I can send it off someplace and so if you want quick simple images that are highly compatible with everything you want to set your camera in a j peg mode and so let's go ahead and do a little demo on the back of the camera hit the cue button to get this activated here and then we're going to navigate our way over to the quality setting hit the set button and we'll see our different options in here and so we have two different large settings we have standard and then they're compressed setting and we have different size medium small and I would never shoot an s three this is seven hundred and twenty pixels by four hundred eighty it's super tiny this is designed for people who don't have computers that needs a very small image and they want to make it very small now at the other end of the spectrum we have raw which is going to be shooting our twenty four megapixels six thousand by four thousand number of pixels we can also shoot wrought and a jpeg now this is going to use up a lot of data because we're taking two photos every time that we take a single photo and so if you're pretty serious I would recommend raw you need do you need to have the right software on your computer if you were just getting started on the camera and you didn't have all the right software on your computer yet I would start with a large j peg you're still getting twenty four mega pixels but the images compressed into a smaller, more easily transferrable package and so that would be the large jpeg would be one option raw would be the other and the raw plus j pig would be only for some special situations where you want rob but you also need a jpeg because you need something right away and so I'm going to go ahead and leave this in rocks that's why I like to leave the camera most of the time all right so back on the keynote. And that should pretty much cover us for the quick men. You know, once again, everything can be navigated through the touch screen. And there is a return button so that you can return back to the normal shooting mode by tapping that on the screen.

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Ratings and Reviews

Jen Hubbenator
 

Feeling pretty good about my T6s purchase! John's teaching style was fabulous, and I am left feeling pretty confident and a lot less overwhelmed!

rodrigo andrade
 

Great Class! John Greengo is an amazing teacher. I have a t6i for like 6 months and this class helped me a lot. Totally worth the money!

a Creativelive Student
 

As a student of John's for the past 2 years with the Fundamentals of Photography, the Nikon D3300 and D5500, I recently traded my Nikon D3300 for the Canon EOS Rebel T6i. As always, the training was superb, easy to understand, and I feel better in being able to use a digital camera. The reason for the switch in manufacturers was because of the ease of use of the Canon. I look forward to referring back to the lessons if I need a refresher course. Thank you, John. Your teaching is starting to click, finally.

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